cmake is certainly worth looking at. Doesn't take much to get up and running with it, it's pretty straightforward to use once you're set up, it takes out-of-source builds seriously, and it's got fair support for adding custom build tools (something you'll have a devil of a time getting working nicely in Visual Studio). Reasonable ecosystem as well, with a good supply of online examples and drop-in helper scripts for locating common libraries. (Compare and contrast to, e.g., MSBuild, boost jam, or JamPlus - all of which, even MSBuild, might as well by comparison have about 0 users each.)

Not to say that it isn't awful in many respects, though. It often feels as if it has been designed by 3 people, none of whom talk to one another, and all of whom have different ideas about how things should work. For every time there's some easy setting that nicely handles every platform for you there's another where you have to carefully distinguish between VC++/gcc/clang/etc. and add compiler-specific flags to some random string. And the scripting "language" is unhinged.

Still - compared to a normal project that targets N platforms, where you might well have to deal with N build systems, all appalling, if you use cmake, you'll only have to deal with one.